Description

How is it that some prisoners of the Soviet gulag—many of them falsely convicted—emerged from the camps maintaining their loyalty to the party that was responsible for their internment? In camp, they had struggled to survive. Afterward they struggled to reintegrate with society, reunite with their loved ones, and sometimes renew Party ties. Based on oral histories, archives, and unpublished memoirs, Keeping Faith with the Party chronicles the stories of returnees who professed enduring belief in the CPSU and the Communist project. Nanci Adler's probing investigation brings a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism and of how individuals survive within repressive regimes while the repressive regimes also survive within them.

Author Bio

Nanci Adler is Associate Professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. She is author of The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement, and numerous scholarly articles on the gulag, political rehabilitations, and the consequences of Stalinism.

Reviews

In a compelling narrative that presents new information and important interdisciplinary insights, Nanci Adler takes readers through the traumatic aftermath of a long mass terror whose survivors struggle to cope with their shattered lives and sustain their Communist beliefs. For anyone interested in the Soviet Stalinist experience but also crimes against humanity elsewhere, this is an essential book.Nanci Adler’s fascinating and impressive new book on Gulag returnees focuses on the question of how a substantial number of communists punished by the Stalinist regime – often brutally and at length – could continue to maintain loyalty to the party and state while interned and even after release. The individual stories she tells to illustrate her answer are crucial for understanding the essence of the Soviet belief system.One of the achievements of this book is that while explaining the experience of the Communist 'true believers' among Gulag victims in terms of sociological notions that were not available to the subjects themselves, Adler manages to maintain human sympathy for these people as well as sensitivity to their special Soviet predicaments.This valuable book contains an enormous amount of information about a group of gulag survivors who retained their love of Communism and its Soviet proponents even after many years of torture at their hands. The theme . . . has never been subjected to a study even close to Adler's in detail and rigor.

Customer Reviews

Table of Contents

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Enduring Repression1. The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul2. Reconciling the Self with the System3. Beyond Belief: Party Identification and the "Bright Future"4. Striving for a "Happy Ending": Attempts to Rehabilitate Socialism5. The Legacies of the RepressionEpilogue: The "Bright Past," or Whose (Hi)Story?NotesWorks CitedIndex